Biography

American naturalist and explorer. Although best known as an ornithologist and mammalogist, Edward William Nelson was a naturalist in the widest sense. Over a hundred taxa were named in his honour, including one genus and 55 species and subspecies of plants. His wide-ranging geographic work is recognised in the names of Nelson Island and Nelson Lagoon on the Bering Sea coast of Alaska and in Nelson Range in southern California. His bibliography lists more than 200 publications on various aspects of natural history and ethnology. He was born in New Hampshire, in a small village north of the city of Manchester. During the Civil War, while his father served as a soldier and his mother as a military nurse, he lived with his grandparents on their farm in the northern Adirondacks. When his father was killed at the end of the war, his mother moved the family to Chicago, where she opened a small dressmaking establishment. Already a budding naturalist when he entered the Cook County Normal School in spring 1872, Nelson contracted a blood infection while skinning some decayed birds and was recommended a period of recovery in the Rocky Mountains. As it happened, the school principal had arranged for his son to accompany the zoologists Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897) and Samuel Walton Garman (1846-1927) on a lengthy field trip to collect fossils in the Badlands of Wyoming, and included Nelson in the party. On his return in January 1873, Nelson's western collections were purchased for the school museum, and he began a correspondence with Dr J.A. Allen at Harvard University, who identified many of his birds, including one new species, which he named Ammodramus nelsoni.

After graduating, Nelson obtained a position as a school teacher but was dissatisfied with the work and soon resolved to become a field naturalist. In 1876 he travelled to Washington, DC, to meet Spencer F. Baird, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who recommended him for a position as a weather observer in Alaska with the Signal Corps of the United States Army. From June 1877 to June 1881 he was stationed at St Michael on the Bering Sea. From there he made several winter journeys by dog-sled in the surrounding country, collecting ethnological data on the Inuit, which he reported in "The Eskimo about Bering Strait" in 1900.

In June 1881, he was taken on as naturalist on board the revenue steamer Corwin, which was on its way north in search of the missing Arctic exploring ship Jeanette. This expedition, which also included John Muir, was the first to reach and explore Wrangel Island, which it claimed for the United States. While preparing his report back in Washington, Nelson developed pulmonary tuberculosis, and was not expected to live. In an attempt to save him, his mother took him to the White Mountains of Arizona, where she nursed him in a tent. He and his brother eventually established a cattle ranch northeast of Springerville, but it took many years for him to recover fully, and during this period of uncertain health and limited financial resources the scope of his natural history studies was restricted.

By 1890 he felt well enough to accept an appointment as a special field agent with the Death Valley Expedition, the start of his long career with the Division of Ornithology and Mammalogy of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). When the expedition was disbanded in September 1891, Nelson was instructed to continue field work in the coast region of California, but after only two months was sent on to Mexico with his assistant Edward Alphonso Goldman, the 18-year-old son of a local orchardist, whom he had recently hired. Their field survey of Mexico, which was meant to least three months, lengthened indefinitely, evolving into a 14-year exploration of every state and territory in the country. Although the emphasis of the expedition was on birds and mammals, other specimens including plants were also collected.

With the completion of this work, Nelson's duties gradually turned from scientific research to administration. In 1913 he was placed in charge of the Division of Biological Investigations, which was followed by a rapid promotions to Assistant Chief (1914-1916) and then to Chief (1916-1927) of the Bureau of Biological Survey. As a senior administrator in Washington, he supported a number of important conservation bills and helped negotiate the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916 with Great Britain. His last two years with the USDA were spent as a Senior Biologist, and after his retirement he was an honorary research associate of the Smithsonian Institution. He also maintained an interest in the orchard business of his longest and closest scientific collaborator, as a co-owner and director of the Nelson-Goldman Orchard Company and the Arizona Orchard Company. He belonged to numerous scientific societies and served terms as president of the American Ornithologists' Union, the American Society of Mammalogists, and the Biological Society of Washington. He was awarded an honorary MA from Yale University and an honorary PhD from George Washington University in 1920.

Sources:
E.A. Goldman, 1935, "Edward William Nelson - Naturalist, 1855-1934", The Auk, 135-148.